District 9's sci-fi cities already exist

This article was taken from the June issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online

Near the start of Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 District 9, the camera swoops low over a refugee camp for a population of chitinous extraterrestrials, marooned on Earth for the past 28 years. Denied participation and access to the human community surrounding them, they eke out a kind of existence -- what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” -- in a fenced-off wasteland in the sprawling slums of Johannesburg. Blomkamp isn’t subtle in his portrayal of this desolate zone and the possibilities of life there.

His streets are little more than dusty tracks lined with tumbledown shacks of corrugated aluminium, garlanded with the infinite tangles of pirate infrastructure; shreds of plastic bags waft in the breeze, the air itself laced with filth from the sooty fires that burn all day long. Derelict shipping containers and rusted, overturned cars mark the market square, where the hapless aliens haggle with the (human) gangsters who control everything that matters.

To the extent that there’s anything resembling governance at all, it’s that imposed from without, public order having been outsourced to the paramilitary arm of a multinational. Blomkamp’s point is clear: District 9 is the Worst Place In The World. Unless, that is, you think the title belongs to Bexhill Refugee Camp, set in 2027 in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men.

This once green and pleasant land totters on its last legs, while Bexhill seaside resort has been pressed into service as a concentration city. Inside its perimeter, a babel of factions huddle up against the misery of a Sussex winter, squabbling over the scraps left in the wake of eco-social collapse. We’re told these scenes are transpiring in some time yet to come: in both cases, the corruption we see is the outcome of a clearly long-drawn-out process, by way of which the world we know has been laid to ruin. But although it’s great fun to titillate ourselves while ensconced in a plush cinema (or alternately, sprawled on the sofa, laptop propped on our knees, watching a torrented file unspool), there’s one thing we might want to bear in mind: for many on Earth, what’s on the screen isn’t the future -- it’s the present.

These -- like other familiar science-fictional depictions of urban collapse and chaos, from Soylent Green and Blade Runner to Minority Report -- are reasonably accurate portrayals of present, real-world conditions for a billion or more human beings living in the favelas, slums and informal settlements of the global south, from El Monton to Khlong Toei. I point this out not by way of guilt-tripping anyone, but rather, in an attempt to backstop another set of extrapolations about “the urban next”, those peddled by technology think tanks, consultancies and corporate research labs.

As someone who spends much of my time thinking about the future of cities, it strikes me as being useful to first reckon with the circumstances under which an awful lot of city-dwellers actually lead their lives. So how do people get by when their everyday looks like the darkest sci-fi?

Ingenuity and adaptability: that hard-to-define quality that Americans call “hustle”. Mutuality: though there’s more than enough exploitation at the bottom of the pyramid to demolish any sentimental notion of inherent human solidarity. And, above all, the ability to endure the worst ruptures and reversals uncomplainingly, an attribute which is very often the product of profound religious faith.

These qualities strike me as key to understanding the cities we’re actually going to get. Along with the Maslovian fundamentals and the sad certainties of discrimination and abuse, they’re the ultimate context in which any technology will take effect. If, as the cliché has it, these futurist sci-fi visions are just funhouse reflections of the present, films such as District 9 are an aperture through which an awareness we’ve otherwise managed to suppress leaks into our lives.

The chaos and squalor they depict is an inescapable reality for some and, if less felicitous scenarios come to pass, a way of life more of us will have to start getting used to. Maybe we ought to pay particularly close attention.